The Return of the Repressed

March 11, 2008

So, with rumors circulating of more write offs and major financial institutions in trouble, does Wall Street want Elliot Spitzer out? Could it be he offended both banks and black budget folks with his comments about predatory lending?

September 23, 2007

Phil over at Gifthub has written what is apparently a satire, of sorts, on Porter Novelli: Many Minds Singular Results (tm). But he seems, if I may be allowed to read between the lines, to be making them an honest offer too. Now, Porter Novelli with the best minds in the world, keyed into getting Singular Results, for those whose Vision Has No Limits, does not need any help from an Adjunct Senior Fellow in Charge of Hidden Meaning in Wealth Bondage. They can hold their own in defending Wade Dokken, their own role in this on-going public relations fiasco, and the role of PR generally in cooking up a Culture of Excellence. From the perspective of the vast history of satire, though, I think we can draw some lessons that might be helpful for Porter Novelli's Crisis & Issues Team as they plan their response, in defense of the Firm, their own profession, and the Fate of Humankind.

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My Crisis Intervention Strategy, if I maybe be allowed a suggestion as professional skilled in Rhetoric, would center on the Persona, or at least the Wallet, of this seedy figure who calls himself Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families. By every indication he is a penniless hack, a blogger on the take, a smarmy hypocrite, a toadying tool of Mistress Candidia Cruikshanks, his esteemed Patron, and my boss, for that matter. Rather than attacking him head on, my suggestion would be to take the hints he has liberally sprinkled throughout his post: Give him a job in HQ, maybe running the Media and Influencer Relations Division. He is good at Masquerade and fits as well just shooting the shit in a Dumpster Conversation as in Driving Public Opinion from the Bottom Up in a Corporate Astro-Turf Context. I know he needs the money. Don' t we all. But with so much at stake what is one million a year? Plus benefits. Just bill it through to Dokken. Call it insurance.

Conrad M. Black ran a "corporate kleptocracy" for his own benefit at Hollinger International,
the publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers, and the
board of directors failed in its responsibilities to monitor what he
was doing, a committee of that board concluded in a report filed on
Monday in federal court in Chicago and made available today....

The report was particularly critical of the audit committee of the
board, which it said had not performed its duties to monitor what was
going on. But the report saved its harshest criticism for Richard
Perle, the former Reagan administration official and current member of
a Pentagon advisory board. It said it did not consider Mr. Perle to
have been an independent director and called on him to return $5.4
million in pay he received after "putting his own interests above those
of Hollinger's shareholders."

Greasing the corporate/governmental kleptocracy, of course, is a bit of philanthropy.

...the committee said large Hollinger donations to "pet charities" of
various directors, including Mr. Kissinger and Robert Strauss, a former
chairman of the Democratic National Committee, "without the restraint
of sound corporate governance controls, raises questions regarding the
independence of those directors."

It said Mr. Thompson and two other members of the audit committee,
Richard D. Burt, a former United States ambassador to Germany, and
Marie-Josée Kravis, the wife of the financier Henry Kravis, "failed to
respond critically to the repeated demands for noncompete payments even
though they should all have known these payments were highly unusual
from the numerous boards on which they had served."

Now, back to Hudson's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. Instead of attacking root causes, like corruption in high places, Bill Schambra would have us look to Hudson for guidance on civic morality and good citizenship. I hope when he writes this stuff that Bill at least closes the door. The stench must distract him. Better to go out by the Dumpster and write while sitting on a sack of garbage.

December 02, 2006

On the recommendation of Inspector Lohmann, I have been reading James Scott, a Yale anthropologist who has himself read Bakhtin. Scott's conceptual framework is simple but powerful. Oppressor (Master) and oppressed (slave), both have their public and private transcripts. The public transcript is what historians study, the media covers, what ends up in the record books as the events, sights, sounds, spectacles, and stories of an epoch. The public transcript, of course, is written by the Oppressor. Now, both Oppressor and oppressed also have their private transcript, the conversations either group has out of earshot of the other. What Masters say about slaves behind the slaves back, or Philanthropists say about losers, is not really part of the public record. A certain decorum draws a veil, as the powerful meet in safe places to speak candidly. Yet, in the Big House, the servants do hear things, and stand like statues, mute and unseeing in their livery. They are not human. Their feelings need not be taken into account. What happens in the Big House stays in the Big House. Those house slaves who fail to follow that rule are sanctioned and replaced with those who know how the game is played. By the same token, the slaves have their own hush arbors, their own secret haunts where they meet far from the aptly named overseer's eyes and ears to tell their own stories. Yet, of course, such stories are dangerous. Better to speak in code, by telling stories of a Fox and a Rabbit. Scott makes clear that these cultures that butt up against each other in the public transcript, dominated by the ruling group, can continue for hundreds or thousands of years like this, in parallel. One is history; the other is largely lost to history. Yet, of particular interest are the crossover points, the crossroads, the thresholds and eruptions of the subaltern transcript into the dominant one. We see that in Carnival, Saturnalia, in folklore, myth, rumor, jokes, memes, folk music, rap and riffs that go from mouth to mouth without an author. What these have in common is that either the messenger or the message is disguised. Who can say where a joke started and who is responsible? In the house of rumor it is the winds who speak. In Carnival masks, as the dancers and party goers swirl into the streets, who can say who is whom or who said what? Alternatively, the hidden transcript can erupt through a priestess in a trance at Delphi, or through the mouth of a Fool, or in the words of a madman who knows not what he says, or it can arrive on the lips of a prophet whose head will soon be displayed on a sliver charger.

In the case of Mandela or Biko, the private transcript of a subordinate group, its healing stories, its self-respect and dignity, assert themselves in the public transcript, attempting to establish a new storyline, a new hero story, a new history and new and more open future. Such charismatic moments, not unlike the French Revolution, that so inspired Wordsworth ("Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive") are also fraught. Mandela went to prison but survived. Biko died like our dearly departed Author Function under the care of the Anti-Terror Torture Police who operated within the alternative procedures required to maintain ordered liberty in that oppressive state in that oppressive era. What the stories of Uncle Remus show is another ideal, another and less risky strategy for survival with some shred of dignity and self respect even within a position of constant humiliation: How to make do in the meantime, how to get by, hidden in plain sight, using "the weapons of the weak," as Scott calls them, including in our case blogs here in our hush arbor, or Dumpster, hidden in plain sight, not seen by the powers that be, but over-looked, not heard but over-heard, in the uneasy truce, or constant cold war, or guerrilla struggle, between transcripts public and private.

For me this conceptual grid, as over-simplified as it may be (since it includes only two groups when there are really so many levels and factions) finally explains a mystery on which I was called out years ago by Turbulent Velvet. He asked why I, as an egalitarian, was drawn to satires written by figures like Juvenal, Horace, and Swift who were quite clearly and conspicuously in the service of Empire and the religious and cultural traditions that supported Empire. Was I crazy? Now I think the mystery is solved. Satire is written into the public transcript, but subsumes and draws upon and cycles back and co-opts, the weapons of the weak. Swift, Rabelais, Erasmus, Dryden, Gay, Pope, and on and on down through Wilde were certainly more closely associated with Oppressor than oppressed, when it comes to rank, social position, social circles, education, beliefs, and way of life. Yet in their work the language of Carnival, language from below, the language of Dionysian revelry, of Beggars beneath a bridge, of Grub Street, of pickpockets, thieves, and prostitutes, of sexual energy, violence, gluttony, and scatology gets cycled back into the public record, but (as Bakhtin would say) "re-accentuated" to bear the stamp of the ruling group's ideology. As with dreams, and jokes, the imagery of elite satire is a condensation of contradictions, hence its explosive power, its danger, for it pulls both ways, towards the private and public transcripts of power and also towards the hidden traditions of the oppressed. The result can be called a safety valve, periodic release, or co-optation, or it can present itself with an alibi ("Just joking, Sir") but it can also open or presage a revolutionary moment, as it did with Swift, Dr. Johnson, and Voltaire. Glasnost and Perestroika may start with samizdat to be ratified later by an official decree when the movement from below has gone to far to be stopped.

So, Gifthtub, The World We Want, and Wealth Bondage - not hard to parse these on the story told above. Two languages, the smooth and candid language of established power, and the contorted language of humiliated peoples, enter the public transcript, in various ratios and measures: At Gifthub, as literal dominant speech, or as comedy; at The World We Want as managerial/promotional discourse written to, by and for the dominant giving class who imagine the world we want as a casual extrapolation of current dominant trends; and at dear old Wealth Bondage, more subversively in an ongoing but unlicensed Saturnalia open to all comers, out in the public square, like a Dumpster or public convenience on whose walls are scribbled the secret thoughts of an oppressed people in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. For us, members of the Dumpster Tong, no official holiday as yet has been declared. Some day, perhaps, we will have our Happy Tutor day, or Dumpster Day, much like the Fourth of July, to celebrate real Freedom - not the phony sort that we have now, ruled under the newly revised law by abduction, torture, and secret military tribunals, but the kind of political liberty on which this country was originally founded and for which so many brave people have already given their lives. In a democracy, the people are sovereign. They have no Decider, no CEO, no Emperor, no King, no President strutting about in Flight Gear and declaring Defeat to be Victory and Torture to be Freedom because he says so upon pain of reprisal. We do not take our opinions from the society of the spectacle. As concerned citizens, we reason with one another, and present our words as a gift to our fellow citizens, though disguised and displaced since Candidia is always listening and brooks no dissent from her dominant narratives of Domination termed Freedom.

Wealth Bondage is a dangerously ambiguous point of intersection, where the Dumpster butts up against the Corporate Head Quarters, for here Uncle Tom , the good house slave, the trusted advisor, who has heard the private transcript of the rich, the private protocols of philanthropists in their safe places, holds forth as Uncle Remus, telling preposterous tales of characters with funny names. In so doing, the Author Function, may he rest in peace, rules from the grave, like a good philanthropist. And perhaps like Biko his death will one day be honored with a peaceful day of Reconciliation where those who abducted him, and tortured him, are brought to justice and tried for War Crimes committed (legally under laws they passed for that purpose) in the War on Terror in which we lost our political liberties, before winning them back in peaceful struggle however long that takes, no matter what the price. But best always to keep the benefits high and the cost low. That is what satire, and carnival, my friends, are all about when they boil over into the public square as a Dumpster Dialogue. Grab a mask. Make your voice heard, but only in jest, parable and story. Why make it easy on those who wish us ill? Let them join us here on our own terms - those of a free people in Wealth Bondage. They too, the rich, the powerful, the think tank thinkers, all of you! Welcome! In your own chosen mask, tell us who you really are, and what you really think. We are all house slaves one way or another. Right? (No? My dear colleagues and fellow servants of wealth, please don't make me prove it from your public transcript, that would be painful for us both. You can ignore me, my colleagues, but I know you well and your story will be told - something about a Fox, maybe.) So, give it up, settle down, take a hit from the bottle of Thunderbird we pass around to confirm our fellowship. I do not judge you. You have done nothing I have not done worse and for less money. You think you are a whore? What about me? I have never pretended to be anything else. We do what we must in this hard world to get by. So, relax. We are all sinners here. We are delighted to have your company.

November 25, 2006

"I will say, I don‘t think there is a single member of the bondage and discipline community and I know some of them, who doesn‘t vote reliably Democratic." Tucker Carlson, Tucker, November 13, via Jossip. Nice job, Tucker, for Wealth Bondage, slapping down the liberal sissies. Come to Momma and kiss her boots. It is hard to be little, isn't it? Such a big world for such a little boy. C'mere, Sweetie, let's straighten your bow-tie and lose the jockstrap. Momma is going to milk you for being such a good boy. Momma is going to create a Master Race of little Tuckers to serve her for all eternity.

September 06, 2006

Alternative listservs where the hippies go to talk; only this time they are going to get busted up good. This is a free country, and me and The Hogs of Heaven plan to keep it that way. Riseup!, Faggots and get beaten flat. These Commies are all talk. Show 'em the chains and they cry like little girls.

August 16, 2006

After the Wealth Bondage Charity Ball we toss out a few tons of shrimp, pate, pheasant, trout, steak, roast beef, cake, pies, nuts, cheese, beer, wine, champaigne, and other items. Recently we have been plaqued by Dumpster Divers who steal this property. Fortunately we have now purchased a trash compactor rendering theft of garbage impossible. Get your own garbage! Or, you will be crushed.

Of course if you are laid off from Wealth Bondage you might want to hunt around in some other company's trash rather than expecting a severance package from us.